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Undead
The dead do not always rest easy: when mortal remains are desecrated, when people pass on with unfinished business or things left unsaid, when magic and spirits are at work, sometimes the dead rise again in one of many forms. There are two broad categories of the Undead; the physical, who are tied to their remains and the disembodied, who are not. Even within those two categories, the undead vary in intelligence, abilities, and motivations. As they are already dead, the undead can be difficult to overcome in battle; they feel no pain and fear little. There are countless tales regarding the destruction of different undead creatures, but correctly assigning specific vulnerabilities to specific monsters in real life can be a taxing proposition. The typical methods of destruction espoused in stories include complete dismemberment with an iron blade, severing the head of the creature and stuffing the mouth with different herbs, covering the creature with oil or pitch and immolating it, exposure to sunlight, immersion in running water, burning the heart or piercing it with a spear of ash or acacia, scattering blessed salt over the creature's grave, and such esoteric methods as having a man who has never lied telling the creature it is dead. Some forms of undead do not occur "naturally" and are engineered by magicians or priests with knowledge of surgery and alchemy. Mamluks Once the soldier-slaves of the Pharaohs, the Mamluks continue to protect their masters and their masters' possessions for all time. They resemble dessicated corpses of different races with their bodily orifices tightly sewn shut, dressed in gilded parade armor. Their insides are stuffed shredded bits of papyrus, covered in faded ink. They usually carry great shields, spears, khopeshes, and or shortbows, and have been known to use chariots pulled by spectral horses. Mamluks do not speak, though they seem to understand speech and while they are intelligent, they are also uninspired thinkers. A Mamluk is as strong as a bull Mumuye and completely tireless, though somewhat slower than a man. They are more difficult to budge than their weight would suggest. It is not known how a Mamluk could permanently be destroyed: a Mamluk will stop fighting and moving when hacked to bits, but they will eventually be reassembled by their fellows, a process as simple as holding its pieces together. Furthermore, their gilded armor is famously cursed, if someone steals so much as a gauntlet, they'll be attacked by scarab beetles every night until they are devoured or they return the stolen armor (disposing of the stolen armor any other way does not lift the curse). To date, no Mamluk has been witnessed outside the Crook of Kings, the desert valley containing the necropolis of Sadar. Mummy, Animal In the days of the Great Kingdom wealthy merchants, nobles, priests, and even the Pharaohs were buried or entombed with mummified animals. They were intended to serve the same kind of role in the afterlife as they had in life: a cherished pet, game to be hunted, a guardian, or beast of burden for instance. Many animals were subjected to mummification: baboons, bulls, cats, crocodiles, dogs, gazelles, goats, ibeses, and oxen represent some of the most commonly encountered types, but there have been instances of almost every animal. They appear as dead, dried out samples of their species, tightly wrapped in linen. Some are adorned with jewelry or masks. Every mummified animal in every tomb in the high plains gained a terrible semblance of life when the seals of Sadar were broken by tomb robbers; just another one of the many curses unleashed that dark day. An animal mummy is as dangerous as a living specimen of it's species would be if it felt neither fear, pain, or weariness. It is one of the weaker forms of undead and is susceptible to dismemberment and fire, a fact which is commonly known. Animal mummies prefer the darkness, but are not harmed by light. Mummy, Servitor Legend has it that trespassers who are captured alive by the traps or guardians of Sadar endure a most cruel fate. As the stories go, the interloper is tied to an altar by the Corpse King's mummy priests and are mummified alive, a ghastly process that involves cutting the person open and removing their innards; naturally the tales emphasize that the victim somehow survives the whole process right until the heart or brain are pulled out. They are then stuffed with straw and herbs, sewn shut, anointed in oils, and wrapped in linen. Whatever their origins, the servitor mummies are definitely fresher looking than the Mamluks and are not bound to the Crook of Kings as the Mamluks seem to be. Servitor mummies are capable of speech and sometimes disguise themselves to infiltrate the lands of the living on mysterious errands for their deathless masters. A keen nose might detect the scent of leather and dried herbs that usually come off their bandaged forms, but this too can be disguised. Servitor mummies have no specific memories from their days spent alive. Like other, weaker forms of the undead, Servitor Mummies are vulnerable to dismemberment and fire. Ghūl Distressingly common in the underground lands of the Dwarves and Obon, a ghūl is the reanimated body of a person who died beneath the earth. A person who was intentionally buried alive or who died while trying to find their way to the open sky will almost always turn into a ghūl, though anyone who died underground for any reason may also turn. Ghūls resemble emaciated members of their species, their skin mottled to match the local stone, and is drawn tightly around their wasted flesh, leaving every bone visible. They possess a rudimentary intelligence and are social monsters, drawn to others of their kind which become akin to a clan. Ghūls dig up the dead to devour, and attempt to capture the living to bite and bury alive in order to make more of their kind. Their skin is supernaturally tough, non-magical bronze and wood can neither cut or pierce it. Their fingertips of sharpened bone can easily tear through leather and wood, and their bite is diseased; those who are bitten and left untreated will become ghūls themselves if they die. Lemures A lemure is the disembodied spirit of a being who was wrongfully slain and not given proper funerary rites. They are vengeful beings who appear as their own bodies at the time of their death, save for a translucent quality. Lemures radiate intense cold can pass through wood, stone, earth, and flesh as if they were water, they use these qualities to kill the living by thrusting their hands through their victim's heart. Putting a lemure's mortal remains to rest will cause them to pass on forever, but many lemures remains are destroyed or otherwise lost. They hide beneath the ground during the day, as the light of the sun will destroy them. Otherwise, it is not widely known how a lemure might be repelled or destroyed, though there are many stories. Gallowborn Most of those who are hung from the gallows perish with hoods over their heads, and that is the end of them. Sometimes the pride of the law demands that the corpse be fully displayed on the gallows as a warning to others, or wicked reavers carelessly leave their kills strung up from trees to shock and outrage those who discover them; these unhooded dead may return to a semblance of life as the Gallowborn. Gallowborn are animate beings, though their dead flesh continues to decompose. Their noose has become a prehensile appendage of great strength, more than capable of supporting their own weight and that of another heavy creature. Gallowborn stalk alleys, canyons, forests, and other places they can get a height advantage over live prey, which they stalk and strangle with their nooses. A gallowborn is an implacable foe, but they're susceptible to fire. Once their body decomposes completely, the force that animates them can continue to maintain their skeletons without any kind of connective tissue; but they become vulnerable to violent force. Category:Creatures